Lexical Distance Among the Languages of Europe

Posted by Teresa Elms on 4 March 2008

This chart shows the lexical distance — that is, the degree of overall vocabulary divergence — among the major languages of Europe.

The size of each circle represents the number of speakers for that language. Circles of the same color belong to the same language group. All the groups except for Finno-Ugric (in yellow) are in turn members of the Indo-European language family.

English is a member of the Germanic group (blue) within the Indo-European family. But thanks to 1066, William of Normandy, and all that, about 75% of the modern English vocabulary comes from French and Latin (ie the Romance languages, in orange) rather than Germanic sources. As a result, English (a Germanic language) and French (a Romance language) are actually closer to each other in lexical terms than Romanian (a Romance language) and French.

So why is English still considered a Germanic language? Two reasons. First, the most frequently used 80% of English words come from Germanic sources, not Latinate sources. Those famous Anglo-Saxon monosyllables live on! Second, the syntax of English, although much simplified from its Old English origins, remains recognizably Germanic. The Norman conquest added French vocabulary to the language, and through pidginization it arguably stripped out some Germanic grammar, but it did not ADD French grammar.

The original research data for the chart comes from K. Tyshchenko (1999), Metatheory of Linguistics. (Published in Ukrainian.)

I understand this posting is from 2008 and I don’t expect any more recent comments…. but

I want to develop a way to measure distance among and between languages / dialects, showing numerically that, for example the dialect in Oslo is closer to the dialect in Tromsø than the dialect in Bergen. I would want to take into consideration not only lexical items, but morphology, phonetics, (and sub- super-phonemic phenomena like tones.

Kjetil Rå Haugesaid

That is a tall order, but you might begin with this article: Peter Houtzagers , John Nerbonne & Jelena Prokić (2010) “Quantitative and Traditional Classifications of Bulgarian Dialects Compared”, Scando-Slavica, 56:2, 163-188 (the U. of Minnesota library ought to have it [men i nødsfall: mail meg]), where “Levenshtein distances” between modern Bulgarian dialects within the Republic of Bulgaria are measured, mainly on criteria of diachronic phonetic/phonemic development, rather than on lexical correspondences (which may be due to borrowing and may be more or less masked by phonetic and semantic developments in the receiving language). Let me also quote a few more sources from the references of that article:

I agree with Colette. The chart is a blunt instrument. The language groups (e.g. Romance) should be in a circle, and the links between groups would make sense. As it is, French is shown as related to Greek, but Italian is not. There should be an average of the relationship of all sub-langauges with another language (or language group) and use that. Otherwise, it should be language-by-language. Also, it shows Albanian as related to Slovak, when it means to show that Alb is related to Slavic. In that case though, it should be shown as related to Bulgarian and Serbian, because it has weak statistical links to Slavic , as a group.

Very interesting. There could be more variation to the size of the circles: now a language with 100 million speakers has a circle that’s just slightly bigger than language with 5 million speakers. But, overall, very fascinating with interesting analysis. There certainly is a very strong connection between English and French.

astheartsaid

Well, I would say you are wrong, sorry. I have no idea what the author meant by Sr, but there is no language like Sorbian; you can find Serbian (SRB), but it is far from Polish. Moreover, I am a language teacher who grew up and lives on Czech-Polish border, so I can speak both languages very well. I can assure you that there is no language between them. Czech and Polish are very close, but Czech and Slovak are even closer; they are so close that any Czechs and Slovaks don’t need any interpretors, and the can speak their mother languages during conversations without any problems. Still, they are different languages. I think something like Sorbian doesn’t exist, anyway, and Longman Dictionary doesn’t know such an expression. 🙂

Astheart, Sorbian is what we call Lužická srbština in Czech, it is correctly placed in the diagram. A language (actually two slightly different languages) nearly died out but still spoken by a few thousands people in Saxony around Bautzen/Budyšin. It is a nice language that Czechs and Poles also understand well, and it is not much further from Czech than Slovak. We are used to understand Slovak and often understand Polish, yet most Czechs probably never heard Sorbian. I only read a few texts in it and I understand most of the words.

astheartsaid

If you had read all comments of mine, you would know I have found out what Sorbian is. Still, I don’t agree it is placed correctly as I heard it and was lost, :). I usually don’t have any troubles with languages that are close to Czech. I keep my opinion that Polish is much closer since I can speak Polish and I learnt it just by listening to it very often during my childhood ( I grew up in Silesia.), 🙂 .

Joesaid

astheartsaid

@Pjt : Sorry I confused you. I had never heard about Sorbian before I wrote that comment, and couldn’t find any information. I mean I didn’t know that expression. 🙂 Then I found some, and I wrote it in my later comments. Now I know what is meant by Sorbian; in my language it is lužická srbština. Still, I keep my opinion that language (if it really is a language, not only a dialect – I am not sure) cannot be put between Czech and Polish as it is totally wrong. I am Czech and I live on Czech-Polish border. I have no troubles with Polish, but when I hear Sorbian/lužická srbština, I have terrible troubles with understanding. Also, Silesian is not a language, it is just a dialect (I can speak it as well.); it changes from a place to place, has not any written code, and no other signs of language. Somebody wrote here that Silesian is Germanic… Well, it cannot be at all (and frankly, it makes me smile). Silesian is a dialect with expressions taken from Czech and Polish, and its “grammar” (It cannot be called grammar in fact) is the mixture of those languages, not similar a bit to German. Though, there are some expressions of German origin, but it’s because of the existence of former Austro-Hungarian Empire. Silesian hasn’t got its written form as well. 🙂

mirimesaid

As I said before Sorbian belongs to western slavic language group and in history the country Lužice was the part of the Czech kingdom till 1814.In some parts of German Sorbian is official language and it is taught at schools.

davidsaid

The reason you understand Czech and Polish well is because you are familiar with those languages as they are both spoken in Český Těšín, or Třinec, or wherever you live. Your argument would be valid if you spoke Czech, had no prior exposure to Polish whatsoever and then encountered both Polish and Sorbian and could understand Polish better (also, this talks about vocabulary only and not about grammar).

I had no idea what Sorbian is either…

Katinkasaid

“Somebody wrote here that Silesian is Germanic… Well, it cannot be at all (and frankly, it makes me smile)”

The term “Silesian” refers to two different language varieties:

1) a dialect of the German language that used to be spoken in Silesia. Due to the expulsion of almost the entire German population of Silesia after the Second World War and their subsequent resettlement in various parts of today’s Germany, this dialect is almost extinct. It’s only spoken by very few and very old people.

2.) a variety of the Polish language with some German influence, which is still spoken in the Silesian region of Poland today.

“because of the existence of former Austro-Hungarian Empire”

– Silesia belonged to the Austrian-Hungarian Empire only until the mid-18th century. Then it became a part of Prussia and, after the foundation of a united Germany in 1871, was a part of Germany until 1945 (except for some parts of Upper Silesia, which were granted to the newly established Polish State after WW1). Lower Silesia used to be almost exclusively German-speaking; Upper Silesia had a mixed population of German and Polish speakers. After the Second World War, the entire territory was given to Poland and, after the expulsion of the Germans, resettled with Poles, many of whom had themselves been expelled from Eastern Poland by the Soviets.

astheartsaid

David, sorry, but I don’t think I am wrong. My view is not based just on my place of living. I am an educated linguist, and I am sure I know what I am talking about. Your opinion is different; okay then, but it doesn’t mean you’re right. I can speak several languages on a decent level, and because of my linguistic education I can see relations among them deeper than somebody who just grew up in Silesia. (It is neither Třinec, nor Český Těšín, 🙂 )

astheartsaid

Mirime, from the Middle Ages the ownership of Lužice changed many times, and there were some periods when it was ruled by the Czech King. (Anyway, there were times when the Czech Kingdom was much bigger than Czechia is now, and also some Czech Kings were Holy Roman Emperors.) But, in 1632 it was given to the Czech Kingdom as a Saxon pledge, and in fact, it was only a formal act. Czech Kings respected it because of the Catholic religion of its inhabitants, and that is also the reason, why Sorbians weren’t assimilated and their language survived. This is the only thing they have common with Czechs; no common history, no common culture.

mirimesaid

As an educated linguist to other educated linguist I only want to say that if you compare basic vocabulary you can see that Sorbian as a language is in the same language group and it relates to Czech, Polish and Slovak.It was my basic thought. And if you look at historical or linguistic maps you can see that the land inhabited by Sorbians wasn´t insignificant in past.
On the grounds of your incomprehension of language you can´t say what you said.It isn´t scientific approach.

mirimesaid

mirimesaid

And last thing do you really think that almost 260 years common history didn´t influenced both nations?Maybe you can explain me why Sorbians tried to connect to our country everytime when the real possiblity appeared (after WWI or WWII) if we didn´t have something in common.

To sum up from the point of view of history and linguistics Czechs and Sorbians are much closer to each other than you assumed.

Martinsaid

Karlsaid

Actually, Armenian is not much influenced by the arabic languages. It’s an indo-european language whose roots are in the Persian Highlands, like the other indo-european languages, which spread from Persia to Europe since about 2000-1500 BC, nearly totally wiping out the ancient european languages with the exception of the Basque language. Persian itself is also an indo-european language. Armenian is thus much closer to English than to Arabic.

Nice! It would be greeat, though, to have a legend that explains what the names of the different languages are. I can’t, for the life of me, guess a language that’s somewhere between Spanish and French that could be called “Pro”. Or the Srd…

Gabrielasaid

It has actually very few words from Hungarian. Of course, it has from Turkisch, Slavonian and French a great deal. But we share a lion’s share of our ACTIVE vocabulary with Albanians through thraciana –> Dacians, thracians – Illarians. There will be yet a lot to be discovered. Future genetics research will reveal it.

astheartsaid

Agreed. I don’t think some language could be between Czech and Polish. I have just found out what Sorbian is, which I didn’t know when I was writing my previous comment. But, I am persuaded Sorbian is spoken by a very small group of people, and it is nearly dead. Anyway, then Sorbian is close to Serbian, but not between Czech and Polish, no way. Moreover, being Czech I can say I don’t understand Sorbian at all, but I understand Polish without any problems. 🙂

Astheart, the Upper Lusitanian Sorbian is closer to Czech while Lower Lusitanian Sorbian is closer to Polish. Some words in ULS are closer to Czech than some Slovak words, some not, but you would understand perfectly if you heard the language as often as Slovak.

mirimesaid

But the country Lužice where people spoke Sorbian was part of the Czech kingdom till 1814. And Sorbian belongs to western slavic language group like Czech, Slovak and Polish.And if you compare words you can see similarities like večer(czech)- wječor/wjacor(sorbian) – wieczór(polish) – večer(slovak) or sníh-sněg/sněh-śnieg-sneh…

Adasaid

Like a lot the idea of building such a map. 2 questions: 1) what is exactly “vocabulary divergence”? 2) If I understood corectly “vocabulary divergence” then there should be more links between Greek and oth languages. What about Romanian and Slavic languages? As far as I know at least 30% of Romanian words are Slavic. Thanks!

MEsaid

Divergence means moving apart: the process of separating or moving apart to follow different paths or different courses. So it means the how languages evolved. and europians love to conquer, historically, and their language mixed with others.

Basquesaid

Pilarsaid

Pay attention to the text: she said “among the MAJOR languages of Europe” [in number of speakers, I suppose]. Furthermore, Basque do not belongs to Indo-European language family (like Finno-Ugric group – represented, in the diagram, by three different languages).

Bittorsaid

Fascinating chart, very nicely done. Question: why did you name the Latin language group ‘Romance’? I mean, if you’re referring to the Roman roots of these languages, the “ce”-affix still seems superfluous and unintentionally indicative of a style-period in art history.

Jakobsaid

Séasaid

Because that is the correct technical term.
I once was looking at an email of French colleague and it said “recieved at 11.15 Romance time”. I had never encountered the term with that usage before. A quick scan of wikipedia shows multiple entries….
Speaking of wikipedia:
“The term “Romance” comes from the Vulgar Latin adverb romanice, derived from Romanicus: for instance, in the expression romanice loqui, “to speak in Roman” (that is, the Latin vernacular), contrasted with latine loqui, “to speak in Latin” (Medieval Latin, the conservative version of the language used in writing and formal contexts or as a lingua franca), and with barbarice loqui, “to speak in Barbarian” (the non-Latin languages of the peoples living outside the Roman Empire). From this adverb the noun romance originated, which applied initially to anything written romanice, or “in the Roman vernacular”.

The word romance with the modern sense of romance novel or love affair has the same origin. In the medieval literature of Western Europe, serious writing was usually in Latin, while popular tales, often focusing on love, were composed in the vernacular and came to be called “romances”.”

Tomsaid

That’s the standard broadly-accepted, traditional name for the Latin-origin language group. This sense of the term has the same origin, and is older than, the other sense to which you refer. While Wikipedia is never an authoritative source, their writeup on the topic isn’t bad: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages#History and of course following their footnotes is a good idea.

[…] and quantum physics; ‘Spooky action’ builds a wormhole between entangled particles; Lexical differences among the languages of Europe. And, if you’re interested in learning new things in 2014, Buzzfeed have put together a handy […]

Ashsaid

That’s an unsatisfactory response because other non-Indoeuropean languages are listed. The reason might be that there is almost no loan words exchanged between Basque and its neighboring Indoeuropean languages. The only loan word I know of that the Spanish imported into Castellano from Basque is the word “izquierda” meaning “left.” The source is the Basque “izkerdu.” The Spanish were terrified of the word “siniestra” which derived from Latin “Sinister,” and the Basque word did not include the semantic feature of “evil, unholy, satanic” that “siniestra” held.

Geir Atle Ekaassaid

Very cool map!
But not everything is right… one wrong is that Norway shows with to few that speak the language. Norwegian language (No not NN) should be marked as a language spoken by more than 3 million citizens.

Jostein Greibrokksaid

Some more details about Norway: In Norway there are two official languges: The majority – bokmål (“Book language”, BOK) derives from Danish, and the minority – nynorsk (“New Norwegian” NN) made in the mid 19th and based upon the dialects and the old norse language.

Nesibsaid

Karlsaid

Until a few years ago, there even wasn’t a Croatian and a Serbian language, it was a common language called Serbocroatian. Language politics in Serbia and in Croatia tried to make a difference where no difference was before.

Arturo Malvestitosaid

It is because Russia as well as Serbia was heavily influenced by Tartars and Ottomans perhaps? While Belarus was never exposed to them until occupied by Russia in 1790s? And Ukrainian language as we know it was formed in Central and Western parts of the country – also out of Ottoman influence?

lkcssaid

Danielsaid

Probably Sorbian (or Lusatian) languages as spoken in the Lusatia region of E. Germany.
What’s strange, though, is that Kashubian is missing, even though it has more than double the number of speakers.

Quarionsaid

Ay S.said

It’s likely left off because it’s not Indo-European; it belongs to none of the language families shown. In fact, it belongs to no language family at all: it’s an “isolate” language. That said, there’s a great deal of lexical sharing between Basque and Spanish, and Basque and French.

becasaid

For Romance languages alone—where’s Piedmontese (1 million speakers), Lombard (2 million speakers), Ligurian (500000 speakers), Corsican, Aragonese, Leonese, Neapolitan, Sicilian, Emiliano-Romagnolo, Gascon, Ladin, Galician, Fala, Mirandese, and many others—not to mention all the dialects of these languages (which in most parts of Italy varies considerably from town to town).

Unfortunately, if a language is not “official” it may as well be given a death sentence. God knows how many of these languages will be around in 100 years.

Best theory I’ve ever encountered regarding the origins of Basque: It was the only language spoken in much of western Europe until Indo-European speakers, emigrating (or fleeing) from eastern lands in the area of Boaz Koj, (near current Turkey) overran Basque-speaking territories and pursued the peaceful Basque speakers, pushing them out of all their communities. Fleeing toward the Pyrenees, found refuge in the shelter of that rocky and inhospitable environment. Below them, the speakers of Indoeuropean dialects which eventually developed into distinct language families, as well as speakers of proto Altaic, and proto Finno-Ugrian eventually carved out areas of settlement. Thus, the Basques were linguistically, geographically and socially isolated from the rest of the European world, surviving as a closed and remotely located culture into modern times.

giovanni caciopposaid

Peter Rutenbergsaid

Karlossaid

Basque is not in that chart just becouse it is unrelated to any of the languages in it. Basque is older than any other language in Europe and there is no study that could yet confirm its origin beyond any doubt

Kimsaid

That’s a good question, and I’m pretty sure the researchers themselves don’t know either. As a matter of fact, Basque is a language isolate. So whereas it should have been put on this map, because it IS an European language, where to put it is another question.

Doniskichecksaid

Jaume Saumellsaid

With all due respect, you don’t know anything about Basque and Spanish, do you? In simple words, a language is a dialect from another language when a native speaker from one and a native speaker from the other are able to understand each other. Not everything is equal but there’s enough similarities to allow a fluid communication. Basque is completely dissimilar to ANY OTHER LANGUAGE IN THE WORLD, so it’s absurd to say it’s a dialect from any other language.

On the other hand, Spain is a country with FOUR different official languages (that is Spanish, Catalan, Galician and Basque). And I said DIFFERENT LANGUAGES, not one language (Spanish) with three dialects. And I should know what I’m talking about since I speak three of them and know a lot about the fourth.

So please, next time at least read the Wikipedia before saying such nonsense.

Alexandrossaid

AMAIURsaid

As far as I know (with the right of Basque speaker) I know that the basque is a non-Indo-European language, as the Finish and the Hungarian mean to be. But if the article is about the “Lexical Distance Among the Languages of Europe”, I feel the basque should appear too (more over 50% of the basque lexicon come directly from the Latin according to some researches). So if the article would be about the relation between the Indo-European language we can dispense with the Basque but not when we want to speak about the lexical relations between the languages in Europe (nothing said about Indo-Europeans there).For the rest I like very much the idea of the graphic.

The presence of loan words in a language is no demonstration of genetic relationship at all. English has borrowed lexical items from a wide variety of languages, many of which aren’t even Indoeuropean. Basque, as I have stated in another entry, is a language isolate which a number of researchers now think was spoken by a population that originally had lived well spread out within Europe and was millenia ago pushed further westward and,ultimately, into Spain by Indoeuropean speakers, and up into the Pyrenees where no one else wanted to settle. This theory was published in the Science section of the New York Times a few years ago. It is a conjecture, but no one has come up with a better one.

formigasaid

The presence of loan words in a language is no demonstration of genetic relationship at all. English has borrowed lexical items from a wide variety of languages, many of which aren’t even Indoeuropean. Basque, as I have stated in another entry, is a language isolate which a number of researchers now think was spoken by a population that originally had lived well spread out within Europe and was millenia ago pushed further westward and,ultimately, into Spain by Indoeuropean speakers, and up into the Pyrenees where no one else wanted to settle. This theory was published in the Science section of the New York Times a few years ago. It is a conjecture, but no one has come up with a better one.

Except for the fact that Bask is spoken around the Basque Mountains and not around the Pyrenees, where Catalan is spoken…

Formiga is not quite right. There is no such entity as the Basque mountains. The Pyrenees separate Spain and France. Catalonia (also spelled Cataluña) occupies the extreme northeast of Spain, so it does touch upon the Eastern Pyrenees. But San Sebastian, the capital of the Basque region, touches the base of the western Pyrenees, and a large percentage of the Basque people live within that mountain range, some on the Spanish side, some on the French. Read the following Wikipedia excerpt:

Basque (endonym: Euskara, IPA: [eus̺ˈkaɾa]) is the ancestral language of the Basque people, who inhabit the Basque Country, a region spanning an area in northeastern Spain and southwestern France. It is spoken by 27% of Basques in all territories (714,136 out of 2,648,998).[1] Of these, 663,035 live in the Spanish part of the Basque Country and the remaining 51,100 live in the French part.[1] Basque is considered to be a language isolate.[2]

In academic discussions of the distribution of Basque in Spain and France, it is customary to refer to three ancient provinces in France and four Spanish provinces. Native speakers are concentrated in a contiguous area including parts of the Spanish autonomous communities of the Basque Country and Navarre and in the western half of the French département of Pyrénées-Atlantiques. The Basque Autonomous Community is an administrative entity within the binational ethnographic Basque Country incorporating the traditional Spanish provinces of Biscay, Gipuzkoa, and Álava, which retain their existence as politico-administrative divisions.

formigasaid

Thank you for your comment. Note that the very article you sent me said: “some consider that the Cantabrian Mountains and the Pyrenees are a single greater range and the Basque Mountains are just part of both [1]” So I suppose both of us have some justice in our conclusions. The major point of what I´ve written regarding the Basque language (Euskara) is the hypothesis that they once inhabited a much larger area of Europe and that millenia ago were pushed further and further west by incoming peoples of Indoeuropean and Finno-ugrian linguistic stocks, and that the Basque speakers could not resist them and retreated further and further west, into the highlands of Southern France and Northern Spain where the terrain was so unfriendly that their pursuers had no further interest in chasing them. Thus, they became the indigenous population of those highland areas. It´s an interesting conjecture and would explain why they are a language isolate.

Russelsaid

I dont completely agree with this chart. I think that it is missing several links, such as Portuguese and Italian, Portuguese and Romance, and others.

Also, the size of the ballons showing the quantity of speakers is misleading. They needed to create more categories (such as >100 million, >300 million, >500 million). Looking the chart, you think that Polish, Ukraine, German, Italian, Portuguese are in the same level of English, French, Spanish.

Although I am Portuguese speaker, I still strongly believe that if you learn Spanish, you will be able to communicate with waaaay more more people in the globe than if you learn Italian.

Annasaid

Looking at that chart, where all bubbles with over 30MM speakers are the same size, you would think so. However, there are about 60MM native speakers of Italian, 200MM of Portuguese and 390MM speakers of Spanish. So the Por-Spa duo has 10 times more speakers than Italian…

Someonesaid

According to this graph, Spanish is closer to more Romance language than Italian (even though Italian is closer to the classical Latin). Also, the number of native Spanish speakers is nearly 390 million, while only 60 million people speak Italian as a native language. I don’t see why it would be so as you said.

Davidsaid

Rafasaid

It depends on how you define “utilitarian”: either you want to learn more languages or you want to communicate with the greater amount of people in their first language.

From the image one can infer that if your mother tongue is not in the group of Romance languages, your best bet is to learn French, as it acts as an “entry point” to the group of romance languages. If you already speak a romance language and want to learn another language, then yes, learning Italian seems to be the best option (on average).

That situation only holds in the case that your goal is to LEARN another language (or many of them). If, on the other hand, your goal is to communicate to a wider audience, you’ll probably want to learn a language that is widely used, then Spanish is the best option of it’s group, followed by French, then Italian.

On the other hand, Spanish have a lot of loanwords from Arabic, which actually introduces you to a different set of languages. For instance, Spanish “algodón” stands for Italian “cotone”, or “cotton” in English. Dissecting “algodón” you get “al-godón”, which is some how a variation of “il cotone”.

Spanish is the second most spoken language in the world take that English, Italian might be useful to make a fool out of yourself when going to your local pizza joint, maybe you should learn to mow down your hedges yourself

Sans Cosmsaid

Javiersaid

Not sure proximity always means ease to learn another language.
Among latin languages, portuguese speakers are said to be the ones that can learn other latin languages the easiest (spanish and italian at least)

Sorin Popsaid

I think Romanian competes very well with this this monopoly of portuguese. Actually, I think a Romanian can learn much easier Italian than a Portuguese. By the way, Romanian and Portuguese seem to sound the most similar to each other from all the romance languages, interesting coincidence.

Annasaid

Ay S.said

I’d say SRD is Sardinian, since it branches from Italian. I don’t know what BOK would be. My best (but not very good) guess is Bornholmsk, a dialect of Danish. But I don’t know why that would merit a bubble of its own.

landskinkensaid

Martin Toressonsaid

The BOK probably stands for “bokmål” vich is a varaiant of norwegian. Im not very sure what the difference is, but I can’t see what it would be otherwise. The Srd probably is Sardinian, but someone else probably know more about that part, since Im not very educated in the mediteranian languages.

Peter M.said

I’m pretty sure BOK is Bokmål, which is one of the written types of Norwegian and is much closer to Danish. That would make NN Nynorsk, which is a more modern written type of Norwegian. SRD I’m less sure about, but if I was to guess based on the abbreviation alone, I’d say it’s Sardinian. However, this leads to the question of why Sardinian was included but other Italian languages weren’t, and I don’t know enough linguistics to say one way or another on that point.

Tristan Robertssaid

Bokmal is presumably Bokmal given its proximity to Danish (it’s the traditional written language of Norway and was basically imported Danish). SRD is probably Sardinian given the closeness to Italian and Catalan.

Daniel Murphysaid

Camillasaid

I’m pretty sure BOK refers to Bokmaal, one of Norway’s two written languages (the other one is NN, Nynorsk). They are not generally considered two separate languages, as they represent the same spoken language, but are based on different dialects.

Verena Hammersaid

As to BOK, I found in Wikipedia: “As established by law and governmental policy, there are two official forms of written Norwegian – Bokmål (literally “book tongue”) and Nynorsk (literally “new Norwegian”). The Norwegian Language Council is responsible for regulating the two forms, and recommends the terms “Norwegian Bokmål” and “Norwegian Nynorsk” in English.”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_language

I think (but I may be wrong) BOK stands for Bokmål (one of the official Norwegian standards). Similary, I think that NN stands for Nynorsk, the other official Norwegian standard. SRD may stand for Sardinian? Some acronyms corespond with ISO language codes, but some do not.

Per-Olofsaid

I’m guessing BOK would be Bokmål, as opposed to Nynorsk (NN) standing next to it. And SRD is probably Sardinian, slightly different to Italian but linked to Catalan, it makes sense.
But a legend would be useful nonetheless.

Xcidsaid

BOK stands for Bokmål, the older of the two norwegiean languages (as compared to the modernized NN, nynorsk), it is still the prefered written standard if I’m not misstaken.
I can’t help you with SRD thou

Andy Walkersaid

Kristophesaid

SRD is Sardinian, and BOK is probably “boknorsk”(book norwegian) as opposed to NN “Nynorsk”(new norwegian), which are two standards of the same language, but since the Scandanavian languages are so close, one standard can share more features with another language.

Veronika Larsensaid

Bok is Bokmål – one of the three official languages of Norway. Bok means book, i.e. the written language. Bokmål is norwegian influenced by Danish from four hundred years of common rule that ended in 1814. NN is Nynorsk, which is based on more traditional norwegian dialects.

Someonesaid

BOK is “bokmål” – one of the official Norwegian languages. The one that stems from Danish, because Norway was under Danish rule for 400 years. During the late 1800, the national romantic period, the linguist Ivar Aasen collected Norwegian dialects and created a new language based on these, mainly western Norwegian dialect. This i the one abbr. NN – Nynorsk – NewNorwegian. As you can see from the diagram, NN is more closely related to Icelandic and the Faroe Islands. Nynorsk is uses by about 10-15 % og the population. Both languages understand each other perfectly, and both are used also in national broadcasting, for instance.

Weisswurstsaid

to Piotrek: Not, this is abbreviation of Sorbian (language)
to Laura Blumenthal: SRD is Sardian (limba sarda) and BOK is bokmål (a dialect of modern Norwegian, while NN is nynorsk, another dialect of Norwegian)

Andreas Skovsesaid

Laura, I don’t know about SRD, but BOK is Bokmål, the ‘old Norwegian’ based on written Danish (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokmål). NN is Nynorsk (New Norwegian) developed as a nationalistic alternative to the Danish-looking Bokmål.

jiosaid

Phesaid

Julessaid

BOK = (Wikipedia Quote) “Bokmål ([ˈbuːkmɔːl], literally “book tongue”) is an official written standard for the Norwegian language, alongside Nynorsk. ”
SRD = (Wikipedia Quote) “Sardinian (Logudorese: sardu/saldu, limba sarda Campidanese: sardu/sadru, lingua sarda) is a Romance language spoken on most of the island of Sardinia (Italy). It is the most conservative of the Romance languages in terms of phonology and is noted for a Paleosardinian substratum.”

Peter Rutenbergsaid

Zdenek Zikansaid

BOK is Bokmål, one of two official variants of Norwegian. They have two standardized versions of the language in Norway, bokmål (lit. “book tongue”), which is the most commonly used variant, and nynorsk (lit. “new norwegian”) which is a century and a half old attempt to unify dialects get rid of Danish influences.

Lukassaid

Eirik Nygardsaid

Norway has two official written languages, BOKmål and NyNorsk. Bokmål is more similar to Danish because of history, while NyNorsk(NewNorweigan) is more like traditional dialects of the western part of Norway.

Markussaid

ddh74said

I think “Sr” is Sorbian, a Slavic language spoken by a minority in Germany that lives near the borders of Poland and the Czech Republic. I think “BOK” is Bokmål, or the written Norwegian language, and “SRD” is Sardinian.

Joshuasaid

Leif Parelisaid

BOK most likely is Norwegian Bokmål (“Book language” ) = one of two varieties of the Norwegian language, the other being nynorsk (“New Norwegian”) which must be NN in the chart. Bokmål is closely related to Danish whereas nynorsk shows similarities with Icelandic and Faroese.

Klimtsaid

Octaviansaid

I think that BOK refers to Bokmal, that is the standard version of Norvegian. SRD refers to Sardinian, a language that is often mis-interpreted as an Italian dialect but it stands as a distinct Romance language whatsoever.

Sanjasaid

Salvatoresaid

Bok is “bokmål”- literary Norwegian, which is closer to Danish than the contemporary Norwegian spoken language. Srd must be Sardinian. Not sure why this is on there – by the same standard, you would have to put other Romance languages on this chart, e.g. Sicilian.

Richardsaid

I’d also love to see a legend, but I’d guess that BOK and SRD are Bokmål (a form of Norwegian) and Sardinian, respectively. NN, right next to BOK, is probably Nynorsk, the other major form of Norwegian.

Henrik Carlsensaid

Bokmål – one of two Norwegian languages. Nynorsk is the other (New Norwegian). The first language dates back to the time, when the Danish king also ruled Norway (untill 1814 (I think – I’m Danish)). Bokmål is closer to Danish, but all Scandinavian languages are rather similar.

Bagsaid

SRD = Sardinian
SR = Sorbian (A tiny Slavic minority inside Germany, close to the Polish border. Not to be confused with Serbian!)
BOK = Bokmal (‘classic’ or ‘literary’ form of Norwgian, i.e. Danish orthography for spoken Norwegian)
NN = Nynorsk (the standardised form of actually-spoken Norwegian ‘dialects’ in the west of the country)

I apologise in advance to Norwegians if my description of the linguistic situation is off. I don’t know nearly enough about language politics over there to speak with any authority. The map shows BOK as being distinct from NN but pretty much identical to Danish (like Croatian and Serbian elsewhere in the map). I didn’t know this. Then again, I might be wrong about what BOK and NN are, but I really don’t see what else they could be.

Petersaid

BOK is Norwegian, NN as well. BOK is short for BOKMÅL, NN is short for NYNORSK. Norwegian is quite a curiosity, with two different (although quite similar) written languages. All Norwegian students learn to write both languages at school. Shouldn’t be necessesary, since all people in Norway understand each other and it isn’t really a question of different languages. It’s just a few different words and a little grammatical variation. It’s a political question 🙂

BOK is Norwegian Bokmål, which is the biggest out of two official Norwegian languages. The NN close to this is the other Norwegian language, Nynorsk, which is the minor of these stwo languages. SRD is Sardinian, used on the island of Sardinia, which is also very close to Italian.

Polsaid

BOK stands for Bokmal Norwegian (the other Nynorsk variant listed as NN), while SRD is Sard, spoken in Sardinia.
I am not surprised by the absence of Basque (I guess it’s not even an Indoeuropean language), but I find it strange not to see Occitan considered.. :S

At a guess, it’ll be Bokmal (the majority Norwegian language, closely related to Danish – NN is the other Norwegian language, Nynorsk) and Sardinian (“the most conservative of the Romance languages in terms of phonology”, says Wikipedia).

anonsaid

Srd refers to Sardinian, the language spoken inSardinia, a large Italian island. Sardinian is not an Italian dialect, but a language, and its Latin roots are very evident, even more than in Italian itself.

botvasaid

What’s the metric of distance used here? I’m wondering where the Baltic-Hungarian lines come from. Those two groups aren’t even in contact (nor have they been in the past), it’s about as unexpected as seeing, I dunno, Danish-Albanian would be.

[…] Lexical Distance Among the Languages of Europe This chart shows the lexical distance — that is, the degree of overall vocabulary divergence — among the major languages of Europe. The size of each circle represents the number of speakers for that language. Circles of the same color belong to the same language group. All the groups except for Finno-Ugric (in yellow) are in turn members of the Indo-European language family. English is a member of the Germanic group (blue) within the Indo-European family. But thanks to 1066, William of Normandy, and all that, about 75% of the modern English vocabulary comes from French and Latin (ie the Romance languages, in orange) rather than Germanic sources. As a result, English (a Germanic language) and French (a Romance language) are actually closer to each other in lexical terms than Romanian (a Romance language) and French. So why is English still considered a Germanic language? Two reasons. First, the most frequently used 80% of English words come from Germanic sources, not Latinate sources. Those famous Anglo-Saxon monosyllables live on! Second, the syntax of English, although much simplified from its Old English origins, remains recognizably Germanic. The Norman conquest added French vocabulary to the language, and through pidginization it arguably stripped out some Germanic grammar, but it did not ADD French grammar. […]

Juliussaid

Jean-Marcsaid

The Basque language is lacking. It’s spoken by more than 1 million people, including spanish provinces, and isnt indo-european. It was probably spoken in south of France and northenrn Spain before all of these.

Rentonsaid

[…] See on Scoop.it – levin’s linkblog: Knowledge ChannelThis chart shows the lexical distance — that is, the degree of overall vocabulary divergence — among the major languages of Europe. The size of each circle represents the number of speakers …See on elms.wordpress.com […]

mr sandmansaid

Gaborsaid

Why is Hungarian closer to Ukrain than Serbian or Slovak? I am pretty sure there is some slight Turkish connection. Bty where is Turkish? Similarly why alban is connected with the furthest south Slavic sountry Slovenia instead of the closest Serbian, or Macedonian? It is almost sure in these cases it is the common subset of those groups that influenced instead of a specific member.

Aggelossaid

There is no Macedonian language. This country that says they are Macedonians is mostly Serbians, Bulgarians, Albanians and Greeks. Their language is Slavic and they didn’t even live in this area when the real Macedonian race (part of the Greek nation) conquered the world.

Musungusaid

BOK is Bokmål, one of the two official standards of the Norwegian language (the other one, marked here as NN, is Nynorsk). The status of Silesian as a separate language is debated, so Sr is probably Sorbian, a small Western Slavic language spoken in eastern Germany, while I’d guess SRD is Sardinian.

pjtsaid

Laura, I assume BOK is bokmål and NN is nynorsk (the official written standards of Norwegian). SRD must be Sardinian, and I suppose SR is Sorbian (Wendish, spoken in eastern Germany), but why is it shortened like that? The author would have done well to stick to ISO 639.

Jeffrey Shallitsaid

SRD I think it refers to Sardinian language. I know it’s considered an autonomous language and I think it’s sardinian since it’s linked to ITA and Catalàn. But a legend would be very useful (I also missing Rm and PRO

John Fsaid

I’m assuming BOK is Bokmal from Norway, which as the diagram shows is very close to Danish. Is SRD Sardinian? Spain is much more linguistically diverse than I realised if GLC is Galician and CAT is Castilian. I didn’t realise there were so many speakers of Frisian.

I’d also love to see Arabic, Hebrew and the Indian Subcontinent’s languages plotted alongside these. Don’t stop there! Plot them all!!!

Clunysaid

GLC is Galician. It is touching Portuguese because they were born as the same language, but later differentiated mainly due to political reasons, when Portugal became independent and its “center of gravity” moved south as the “Reconquista” advanced.

CAT is not Castilian, it’s Catalan. “Castilian” is in fact the real name of what you call “Spanish” in English, because it is the language originated in the Castile region of Spain, which (again for political reasons) along the centuries became established as the “lingua-franca” in the whole territory of Spain. Only a percent of Spaniards (about 75%) have it as their mother tongue, but all of us are required to understand and speak it fluently.

Le_Chat_Noirsaid

A beautiful illustration, indeed! Thank you, Teresa and Dr. Tyshchenko! To reply now, if I may: “Laura Blumenthal”: BOK stands for Bokmål (literally meaning “book tongue”), the preferred written standard of Norwegian and similar to Danish, while SRD stands for the Sardinian language. To “St. Izzy O’Cayce”: I respectfully disagree: among the Romance languages, the best to start with is Latin for the basis (vocabulary and roots), then continue with Romanian (that’s a tough one!) and French or Portuguese. Why is that? Well, a fluent Romanian and/or Aromanian speaker would rather easily understand Corsican, Sardinian, Romansh (Rhaeto-Romanian), Italian and Spanish (particularly the Catalan dialect). To “Piotrek”: SR stands for the Sorbian languages in the Lusatia region of eastern Germany, and are closely related to Polish, Czech and Slovak. To “Jonathon”: the Basque language (Euskara) is a language isolate, a remaining descendant of the pre-Indo-European languages of Western Europe, and probably dates to the Stone Age or Neolithic period; otherwise, in Basque there are only a few words borrowed from Spanish and French.

Cunnilinguistsaid

I personally think that this chart has a lot of mistakes. But I’m focus “just” on these I really know, because I come from Slovenia. Our nation (SLO) has population of 2 million and Slovakia (Svk) has population over 5 million, but the circles’ diameter don’t represent that – is it possible that Tereza Elms switched us just like many people do? I think so 😛 The other thing … slovenian language is on this chart connected to croatian, but not to serbian!? And the distance between croatian and czech should be smaller than the distance between slovenian and czech. Also, why is russian so nicely connected to almost every slavic language but not SLO and CRO? And why isn’t there a connection between CZE and POL??? Oh, gosh … :S 😀

Jamessaid

Vaughansaid

Yes, can someone help with the abbreviations? BOK has a similar number of speakers to Danish, Swedish or Dutch, and looks too big to be an obscure minority language (it’s not Afrikaans, is it? Come to think of it, where IS Afrikaans? Very similar to Dutch…).

Closet Linguistsaid

I would presume BOK to mean Bokmal Norwegian, SRD to Sardinian and Sr to be Sorbian. Is there a connection between languages labelled in all-caps and ones which only have a capital initial? (I suspected them to be “official language of a country” vs others, but surely Estonian [Est] must be the official language of Estonia — so there goes that theory!)

Also to St. Izzy O’ Cayce: This is only the lexical distance, meaning how much history of vocabulary the languages share amongst each other. So yes, Italian words look most “average” amongst Romance language. A valuation of “utalitarian” has to take into account other factors as well, complexity of grammar, syntax and pronunciation, geographical proximity, number of speakers worldwide and in a restricted geographical neighbourhood, historical relations etc. All these parameters are dependent on where the learner is situated, what their native language is, which other languages they already know and how proficient they are in them (in order to make meaningful connections between their foreign languages). When again taking the average over all of these parameters, then Spanish, or more precisely Castilian, fares much better, as more people are much more like to have a Spanish-speaking country nearby rather than being close to Italy (being close to both is tie-broken by the fact that there are 406 million native speakers plus another 80 million non-native speakers versus Italian’s total of 60 + 25 million or so). Just my two cents.

Disclaimer: I am not a professional linguist, but here’s my interpretation of the abbreviations by language group.

That’s interesting, but how should we interpret Lithuanian standing between German and Polish? Of course, taking into consideration the geographical proximity, these languages must have some vocabulary in common, but I’m not sure whether putting LIT between those two languages is entirely correct.

astheartsaid

Søren Hardersaid

BOK must be Bokmål i.e. the Norwegian dialect that comes from the Danish-Norwegian spoken in the cities before NN, New Norwegian was recreated from the more original rural dialects (at the time when Denmark lost Norway to Sweden). SRD must be Sardinian. Some of the links are spurious: Irish Portuguese, Dutch Greek. Why is (Scots) Gaelic not linked to English and why are the other germanic languages not related? (Viking vocabulary in Irish e.g.).

Fennosaid

Very good and interesting! Thanks a lot!
Few points:
I believe there should be a strong link between catalan and provensal since in middle ages it was a single language.
Another point of confusion is a number of speakers of Slovak compared to Slovenian – seems that circles should be changed.

KBNsaid

Petersaid

There are approx. 5,5 mil. innhabitants living in Slovakia and almost 5 mil. Slovaks living abroad, so it should be in bigger circle, and Slovenia should be in smaller. Also, Cze and Pol should be connected with (<25) line.

Csudisaid

Something is not right here. Hungarian is very very distant from grammar point of view, but in fact, only 10% of the vocabulary is original Hungarian. If the chart shows origins of words, it should be much closer all the three major groups.

Basque is unrelated to any of them. One theory is that the Basque were the first Europeans, then retreated into their mountains as others arrived later. Basque has a few word in common with both Aztec and Finn-Urgic, so there’s a puzzle for you.

Miasaid

How did you determine the number of speakers? Slovenian has MORE than 3.1 million speakers (in a country with a population of 2 million), whereas Slovak has LESS than 3.1 million speakers (in a country with a population of 5.4 million people). Also, the lexical distance between Slovenian and Albanian should be higher, I think.

Cunnilinguistsaid

They obviously mistook Slovakia for Slovenia or vice-versa … nothing new :p
But – why do you think the lexical distance between Slovenian and Albanian should be higher??? I’m surprised there even is a connection …

Jędrzej Tomasz Flic-Matuszewski herbu Trąbka z Gwizdkiemsaid

Annasaid

Great chart but some links and languages are missing I think…
Where’s the link between catalan with gallec, portuguese and french… sometimes, catalan it’s lexicaly more closed to gallec or french than to spanish….
And where’s basque? I heard that basque had some links with albanian…

Reblogged this on The Monster's Ink and commented:
Oh, look, some porn for language nerds.
I think it’s hilarious how Albanian and Greek are sitting there all alone, like, “Who are all THESE assholes?” Though I also think Albanian would be insulted to hear that it’s lexically closer to the Slavic family than to the Romance family.

George msaid

Greek (Modern Greek: ελληνικά [eliniˈka] is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, western Asia Minor, Greece, and the Aegean Islands, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history; other systems, such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary, were previously used.

The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn THE BASIS of the Latin, Cyrillic, Coptic, and many other writing systems.

The Greek language holds an important place in the histories of Europe, the more loosely defined Western world, and Christianity; the canon of ancient Greek literature includes works of monumental importance and influence for the future Western canon such as the epic poems Iliad and Odyssey.

Greek was also the language in which many of the foundational texts of Western philosophy, such as the Platonic dialogues and the works of Aristotle, were composed; the New Testament of the Christian Bible was written in Koiné Greek. Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world, the study of the Greek texts and society of antiquity constitutes the discipline of classics.

Greek was a widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world and beyond during classical antiquity and would eventually become the official parlance of the Byzantine Empire.

Greek roots are often used to coin new words for other languages;
Greek and Latin are the predominant sources of international scientific vocabulary.
(WIKIPEDIA)

Cunnilinguistsaid

Joakim Ringblomsaid

Laura Blumenthal: BOK almost certainly stands for “Bokmål”, which perhaps is more known as standard Norwegian/”Dano-Norwegian”. It is slightly different from New Norwegian (NN). Both are spoken in Norway. As a non-linguisticly skilled Swede I would guessed that they are just diffferent dialects, but apparently the real linguistics sees it otherways. I have no idea what SRD is though.

BOK is probably a variation of Norwegian. Often it is one of the font variations you can get on a computer. From Wikipaedia:
There are two official forms of written Norwegian – Bokmål (literally “book tongue”) and Nynorsk (literally “new Norwegian”). The Norwegian Language Council is responsible for regulating the two forms, and recommends the terms “Norwegian Bokmål” and “Norwegian Nynorsk” in English. Two other written forms without official status also exist, the major one being Riksmål (“national language”), which is somewhat closer to the Danish language but today is to a large extent the same language as Bokmål. It is regulated by the Norwegian Academy, which translates the name as “Standard Norwegian”. The other being Høgnorsk (“High Norwegian”) that is a more purist form of Nynorsk, which maintains the language in an original form as given by Ivar Aasen and rejects most of the reforms from the 20th century. This form of Nynorsk has very limited use.

Dídac Busquetssaid

@Fernanlee: well, I know this is a rather more political issue than a linguistic one, but IMHO (and the opinion of most of the linguists) Valencian and Catalan is the same language. The differences between what is spoken in Catalonia and what is spoken in Valencia are so minimal that they are (should) be considered as being dialects (whether the “overall” language should be called Catalan, Valencian, CatValan, that’s also a political thing). Not to mention including the Balearic dialects…

nikloszsaid

Kefalosaid

Cédricsaid

I’d be interested in any reference describing the methodology (how — and with what data — the inter-languages distances have been calculated). Is everything only described in the original publication, in Russian? Any translation out there? Is it a book or a paper? Cheers!

Maury Incensaid

@ Laura Blumenthal: BOK = Bokmaaal, the oldest of the two languages spoken in Norway (the other one is called Nynorsk = New Norwegian). SRD = Sardinian, a language spoken in Sardinia (one of Italy’s biggest islands). 🙂 Hope that helps!

Paulsaid

Sergi Monrealsaid

Dear Ms Elms,
Respectfully requesting to review the links of CATalan. It is very similar to PROvençal, there should be a black continuous line. I would like to rememeber that they were considered almost the same language in the upper medieval age. However, no line joins them in the graphic today. Similarly, there should be a line between CATalan and FREnch.
Regards,
Sergi Monreal

liburnisaid

interesting diagram ! why doesn’t it show ROMANI / ROMANES ? there are at least 6-8 Million Roma people living in Europe so I don’t think you can exclude them from your considerations. I mean Iceland has 320thousand inhabitants which is 25 times less than Roma people all over Europe.

tomsaid

Chrissaid

Wracking my brains but I can’t come up with a Germanic language spoken by 3 million plus people that could be signified by BOK. Surely not Afrikaans, given its lexical distance from Dutch and proximity to Danish and the other Norse languages.

Roslyn Raneysaid

Why is Irish connected to Português instead of Gallego?Both modern gallego and portuguese descend from the same gallego-portugues medieval language, in that sense why isn’t gallego also connected to irish?

cristinasaid

” As a result, English (a Germanic language) and French (a Romance language) are actually closer to each other in lexical terms than Romanian (a Romance language) and French”.
What sources did you use for this information? My native language is Romanian and I’m fluent in both English and French and I can assure you that this information is totally inaccurate, you can’t even compare English and Romanian in terms of Latin terms

Séasaid

Where is Klingon? Where is glossolalia? Where is Esperanto?
Oh that’s right, like Basque, they are not from the Indo-Eurpoean family, and so are not connected to major European languages.
It is not part of some campaign to ignore all things Basque. Basque just doesn’t happen to be connected to other languages. There are no dots in the graph all on their own.
Imagine a dot with BAS, not connected to any other dot…adds nothing to the graph.

Clearly this piece of research was meant to politically define Europe, and if you are not present you obviously don’t count…lol

Do you honestly expect someone that does research to cover absolutely every possibility, or is it not acceptable to do some research which covers the ‘major’ languages or Europe?

Iansaid

Davidesaid

Most of languages spoken in Italy are missing… And it’s a pity because, for examples, Gallo-Italic languages are a bridge between Italian and the languages spoken in France and Spain… And moreover the border between West and East Romania crosses along the Gothic line La Spezia-Rimini (or more exactly Massa-Sinigallia)…

anne mcdsaid

The relationship between English and French is similar to the relationship between Persian and Arabic. Persain (an Indo-European lranian language) has absorbed a lot of Arabic vocabulary thanks to the Islamic conquest. Around 40-50% of Persian vocabulary comes from Arabic. Persian syntax, though, still retains its original Iranian features.

To Laura – yeah, I can’t find the legend either. “Srd” I will guess is Sardinian. FA is spoken on the Faroe Islands. Maybe this for BOK: “As established by law and governmental policy, there are two official forms of written Norwegian – Bokmål (literally “book tongue”) and Nynorsk (literally “new Norwegian”)”.

Carlo Persianisaid

Carlo Persianisaid

Replying to myself, for the basque friends. Not being a linguist, nevertheless I think that the most ancient european language (basque) has no real ties with the Indoeuropean group and for this reason the original author did not put it in this diagram.

Emeliesaid

Sebastià Giraltsaid

It is not correct regarding Catalan, which is the closest language to Occitan (Pro) and closer to French than Spanish and probably Italian. It should be placed among Spanish, Occitan (Pro) – French, and Italian. Therefore, its central situation makes it the most suitable to learn all the Romance languages.

kate butlingsaid

Jacobosaid

Very cool! Some odd things here… Don’t more people speak Slovak than Slovenian? Aren’t Slovak and Czech very close? And I have read that Catalan and Provencal are closely related. Is there an analogous technique for measuring grammatical distance?

CsendesMarksaid

The author had to feel awkward about Hungarian, because those lines not really representing the actual facts!
It’s Finno-Ugric, but isn’t related to any Baltic languages.
Hungarian is more closely related to the West Slavic languages (and less to the Eastern Slavic Ukrainian), and also influenced by _German_ Greek and Latin languages, not to mention the Turkish languages.

xabiersaid

Januszsaid

Jaume S.said

Very interesting post and graphic, but there’s two little mistakes. First of all, where’s Basque? (already noted by Jonathon). And second, I’m a native Catalan speaker and I miss a connection line between my language and French, since both are extremely similar. In fact, Catalonian is kind of equidistant between Spanish, Italian and French.

Luljeta Koshisaid

BTW I have to dissent on Hungarian. Sure, it’s pretty far from everything, but vocabulary-wise it has tons of words adopted from German (just like Czech and Slovak BTW) and then Latin, so vocabulary-wise I’d place it much closer to German and the Romance languages. I’d also place it closer to Czech, Slovak and Serbo-Croatian too (and wouldn’t place it anywhere near Ukrainian, to which it’s just as distant as to Russian for instance). I’d also place Slovak closer to Czech, because nothing’s closer to Czech than Slovak (the two languages are mutually pretty much intelligible).

Fabiosaid

The link ITA – GRK is missing!! About 30% of italian words have greek origin, and for sure there’s much more in common between Italian and Greek (Magna Graecia was bassical southern Italy) than between Duch & Greek (????) Lithuan & Greek (???) and French & Greek!

Stephansaid

As pointed out by a number of other people, it would be good to use a more standardized set of language codes/abbreviations.

One possible source is below; in the language translation and localization industries, we use these codes, and even though they may be new to folks outside of the industry, at the very least we will be able to base our discussions on the same nomenclature:http://www.science.co.il/Language/Locale-codes.asp

VKsaid

To Piotrek and Laura: Sr is not Silesian, but Sorbian (spoken in Lusatia, Germany), SRD means Sardinian and BOK Bokmål, one of the two official standards of Norwegian (the second one is Nynorsk, here NN).

Christophe Simssaid

Matti Virtanensaid

BOK is bokmål, the standard Norwegian, different from NN or nynorsk, spoken upcountry. SRD is most likely sardinian. Sr would be sorbian, the slavic minority language in Germany. But what’s PRO? Besides Basque, others missed are Letzeburgish (Luxemburg), Moselfranken and Karelian.

Gentossaid

Albanians have with NO ONE. IT IS A SEPARATED LANGUAGE. It is the mother language of all Europeans. Even ancient Greeks philosophers spoke Albanian, even today the “ancient Greek language” has nothing to do with the modern (KATHAREVOUSA) Even today Albanians can understand what was written 3000 years ago from Greeks. ( Because was pure Illyrian=Albanian language)

Altinsaid

Me and a couple of friends of mine have been digging around this chart for a bit after one of us wondered what “Ir” in the language codes might mean. Right now, even though one of us reads Ukrainian — which seems to be the language the work is written in, instead of Russian — we haven’t been able to find the source data for the graph. A version of it does seem to appear in the background of the cover of the print edition of the book, but nothing else has surfaced. More than a few people who know something about their linguistics have also noted highly suspicious omissions in lexical overlap, and a weird absence of certain languages over all, like Russian, minority Finnish-Ugric languages and Turkish.

Thus, could somebody help us trace down where the chart *precisely* came from, what its underlying data sources are, and how precisely it came to be associated with a work in linguistic *meta*theory which doesn’t appear to deal in this kind of lexical minutiae at all?

Carlos Bravo Villalbasaid

@Laura Blumenthal, BOK is Norwegian (apparently there are two different written forms of Norwegian, one of which is called Bokmål, who knew?) and I’m assuming SRD is Sardinian. Because yes, I am a nerd.

There’s a lot of comments asking about Basque. Since it isn’t related to any known language, I’m sure that’s why it hasn’t been included. I would make a guess, however, that there may be a measurable lexical distance between Basque and its geographic neighbors (such as Spanish and Galician).

Patricksaid

Laura Blumenthal – SRD is Sardo, the Sardinian tongue, which my brother in law speaks – he describes it as a cross between italian and Catalan, and when we were in Barcelona he had no problem being understood or understanding, despite never having been to Spain or spoken Spanish / Catalan before. BOK is Bokmal, not a type of Danish as you might think from the map, but the official written form of Norwegian ( NN is Nynorsk) the purest or purist form of Norwegian. As in any post-colonial situation there are as many arguments around as you care to find! A really interesting depiction i must say. Noted the lack of Basque, but again it is unconnected to any other language so maybe it would have felt a bit lonely sitting there with no lines connecting it to anyone else. And I notice the entire Scots language family is missing from the Germanic family too, which would doubtless infuriate our own Ulster-Scots Agency were any of them actually interested enough in language or linguistics to check this diagram out…

Wayne Johnsonsaid

Lee Friedmansaid

Basque, Maltese, and Turkish certainly qualify as European languages as much as some of the others on the graph. However they are outliers with regard to lexical distance which seems to be the primary characteristic to be depicted. They could be included as circles on the outer edges.The graph is also not restricted to Indo-European languages nor those written in the Roman alphabet.
There is another omission that hasn’t yet been mentioned: Yiddish is a European fusion language closest to the Germanic group but with significant Slavic and Romance components as well as Semitic components and it is usually written in a Semitic alphabet. There is even empty space available in the graph between Germanic and Slavic (closer to Germanic) with room for links to Italian and French.

hecatesaid

I think it’s also important to note what the contribution of a given language can be to Overall European Babel… If one would like to to find as many words for sports, England will be the best supplier. Like for winds, sailing, rail travel, politics, pop music… The word power of English words must be recognised walking along the streets of London, the largest village of the globe, reading the names of some streets. Oxford Street, Haymarket, Threadneedle Street (in the very City)… These names and plenty
would sound funny if translated into other languages… And let’s stop here. In some languages the team of best players playing versus the team of a specific country is called the World’s Selection… The English simply call it The Rest of the World… Dignity.

Elenorsaid

BOK and NN are Boksmal and Nynorsk, the two varieties of Norwegian language. The former is basically Danish with some Norwegian localisms. The latter is the standardized version of the old dialects which maintained a more thorough West Norse character.

SRD is presumably Sardinian, well regarded for its conservative features preserving aspects of Roman Empire era vulgar Latin.

Tonje Folkestadsaid

BOK is Norwegian bokmål, (lit. “Book language”), i.e. The variety write by the majority of Norwegians. NN then refers to Norwegian nynorsk (“new norwegian”), a written form developed In the 1800s based on rural dialects.

Stevesaid

I could just add one thing to this.
There is no such thing as Finno-Ugric languages. There has never existed such a people as Ugric, no remains, no archeological or genetical evidence has ever been came to light that would support this. It is merely a theory that was invented by the Hapsburgs in the 18.-19. century for political purposes (to discredit Hungarian history).
The truth is, as recent genetical experiments reveal, that the Hungarian
is the original population of Europe that survived in the very heart of the continent. Hungarian is so different from any other languages due to its age: it’s a neo-paleolithic language, a living fossile, that pre-dates all Indo-European languages around it. Ancient Sumerian (Mesopotamia) texts, and Etruscan scriptures can be still in traces understood even in modern
Hungarian. Moreover the first human writing ever, the so-called “Tartaria Tablets” from 5200BC are written in Hungarian Runic script. They were found in the valley River Maros by female archeologist Torma in Transylvania (then Hungary, now under Romanian occupation). Scriptures written by Hungarian runic script are allegedly also found in the Bosnian piramyds in Visoko, Bosnia.

bulibashescusaid

“Under Romanian occupation” :))))) Yeah, right, Pista, since 75% of the population is Romanian, and the historical percentage of the Romanian population ranged from 62% to 53.8% (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transylvania#Population). Get your facts straight, Pista, before you start posting your nationalistic crap here

Gabrielasaid

And think of the millions Romanians killed by Austro-Hungarian Empire and those before them. So, the Hungarians lived here thousands of years BC and, after going we don’t know where, they came back in about 11th century. BUT hey, no Hungarian was still living there… HMM … Logic… Yeah…

Marc Costasaid

Fransaid

the graphic should be tridimensional, horizontal distance should show common origen of a word, for example agua in Spanish and eau in French both came from acqua in latin, and vertically how far the words are from original (close for Spanish far from French). In that case, in the horizontal axis, French will be closer to Spanish (both Gallo-Iberian languages) than Italian, but Italian will be closer in total. Other example: camino in Spanish, chemin in French, from Celt, camminus and via in Italian latin via

Jarmo Lsaid

Sr probably means Sorbian, Srd means Sardinian, I believe. BOK means Bokmål, one of the two official languages of Norway, and NN means Nynorsk, the other one. And yes, where is Basque? It would be interesting to see what methods have been used. JL

Fransaid

Probably a lot of English word are Latin origen (“to continue” for example) but the most used and normal used one are German ones (“to go on” for example). If you count the number of different entries in a dictionary , English looks Latin but when you count all the words, including repetitions (like the word “the” or “of”) of most of the texts in English (other that scientific), it is definitively a German language

Luljeta Koshisaid

BNsaid

The statement “All the groups except for Finno-Ugric (in yellow) are in turn members of the Indo-European language family” is a bit of a myth, isn’t it? I attended a national history seminar in Finland last year, where this “fact” was contested, at least. Certainly finnish is uncomprehenasable to other scandinavian language speakers (unlike swedish, danish and norwegian, which can communicate quite easily in-between with only little training), but when you analyze it word by word, you find lots of bits that are common. Finnish is also a so-called kasus-language, unlike any other scandinavian language, but it has this in common with russian, german and italian, to name a few other, indeed Indo-European languages. Finnish grammar isn’t alien, like for instance eastern asian laguages. Geographically it doesn’t make sense that one language group, Finno-Urgic, should remain as a vertical island in almost mid-Europe, unaffacted by the huge movement of people from east to west the last few thousand years. For basque, it makes a little more sense that it could remain a language-island, as it lies in an outskirt. As with other “young” countries, like Norway, there was a process in Finland starting in the second half of the 1800s where the nation’s own language was constituted, and where the difference from others was indeed important to stress. This can explain the very different spellings of some words, which has the same origin as the same term used in for instance sweden, the arch enamy. This constructed difference / national myth isn’t as important now.

Altaysaid

This chart is totally meaningless! The author had to consider the issue from the perspective of origin and reality rather than political considerations! Example: just in Russia there are so many representatives of different languages, take various Ugor languages. Altai family: Azerbaijani, tatar, bashkird, Volga bulgarians, karachays, balkars, kumiks, nogays. If he thinks that the large space of Russia is only about the Russian language, then his paper work looses its value..

BOK is standard norwegian which is based on danish. NN is “nynorsk”, new norwegian, based on old west-coast norwegian dialects. Plattdeutsch (low german) is missing. Modern german is not like low german that often can be understood by a swede if spoken. It provides a link between the scandinavian languages and frisian, dutch as well as german. The three existing lapponian (sami) languages are missing as well. SRD most be sardinian.

It’s a nonsense that Albanian is closer to Slovenian than to Romanian. It is much closer to Romance languages and has no connection at all with Slovenian(?!), because Slovenians had never got in touch with Albanians throughout history. On the other side, “modern” Albanian borrowed many words from Serbo-Croatian, so I think this is where Albanian should be connected to the Slavic language group.

Jamessaid

Goran, for the sake of the truth, neither “modern” Albanian or old one didn’t borrow any words from Slavic language group (Albanians didn’t come from Carpathian mountains like Serbs), so please do some research and read more before you make any comment.

Cunnilinguistsaid

Antoniosaid

Scholars thoughts are that Albanian must be closer to Romanian due to the Thraco-Dacian-Illyrian connection but never ever to slavic language group. Are you kidding?! Just because of some words borrowed due to the slavic invasion?!
I really don’t know on what basis the connections here are assumed but if there is any scientific meaning I would say that maybe the Illyrian substrate makes Slovenian and Albanian closer. But I really don’t think there is any real research on this map.

adrianosaid

Farid Belkhatirsaid

Jonathon, Basque is not an Indo-european language, therefore it is not related to any of the cited languages. Laura Blumenthal, BOK should be Bokmal, the educated dialect of Norwegian, and SRD should be Sardinian.

Ignaziosaid

Dearansaid

Piotrsaid

@Piotrek Lesser and Upper Sorbian from Lusatia. But how Hungarian is related to Lithuanian or Latvian? Ukrainian maybe, thanks to Carpathian Ruthenia but it’s weak. They may have rather some connections with Turkish or German thanks to historical domination of the Sublime Porte and Habsburg Empire.

Barnasaid

Mats Sjöblomsaid

BOK would be Norwegian Bokmål (an Eastern Scandinavian language actually based on Danish rather than spoken Norwegian, as opposed to Nynorsk, a Western Scandinavian language reconstructed from spoken Norwegian dialects in the 19th century), SRD would be Sardinian.

curious brosaid

Viktoriesaid

I really dig your concept, well done!!!! But please tell me, why there is no Bosnian? Dont get me wrong, Im nor angry nor Bosnian, but I just wonder because Ive been studying South-Slavic languages and I know for sure that Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian may be all very similar languages in general principle, but since this should be the lexical distance and there are a lot of words of Turkish descent Bosnians use and the other two groups dont use, Id assume Bosnian would have its place. Thank you for the answer!

Yes, where *is* Euskara? I was surprised that surprised Albanian, long touted as another isolate, is closer to Romance than Greek is to, say, Lithuanian. But it appears that Basque is literally “off the chart.”

Fernandosaid

I categorically disagree with the apparent lack of common vocabulary between PRO and CAT. They are so close we used to study their joint medieval literature together back at high-school.
It is only through the Occitan linguistic continuum that CAT and FRE find themselves linked.

Aggelossaid

You use words as “etymologikon”, “monosyllables”, etc. but you do not refer to the Hellenic (Greek is absolutely wrong term) language that is the base of all the others. Very “good” ANALYSIS (another Hellenic word in the English language)!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jenssaid

@ Laura: I’m pretty sure BOK stands for the Norwegian variety Bokmål (as opposed to Nynorsk which was apparently abbreviated as NN). SRD is probably Sardinian.
But a legend would certainly help, I agree! I’m wondering what PRO is supposed to be.